Is Dell SC1435 likely to work with FreeBSD?

[John Polstra]

On 09-Nov-2006 John Polstra wrote:
> Do any of you have an opinion as to whether the new Dell SC1435 is
> likely to work with FreeBSD (either 6.x or -current)?  I don't think
> they're shipping yet, so I doubt anybody has actually tried it.  The
> machine has Opteron 2200 series CPUs with a Broadcom HT-2100 and
> HT-1000 chipset, according to the spec sheet.

For the archives:  I bought one of these systems, a fairly inexpensive
version with a SATA disk controller rather than the more expensive
SAS controller.  It works fine with the i386 version of -current.  (I
haven't tried an amd64 kernel.)  The on-board gigabit NICs work well
with the bge driver.  I have been told that the mpt driver works with
the SAS controller on the more expensive configurations of this box.

Like most Dell servers I have used, the box is pretty loud.

There is one strange thing with the SATA controller.  In the boot
messages I get this:

atapci0: <ServerWorks HT1000 SATA150 controller> port
0xecb0-0xecb7,0xeca0-0xeca3,0xecb8-0xecbf,0xeca4-0xeca7,0xece0-0xecef mem
 0xefdfe000-0xefdfffff irq 6 at device 14.0 on pci3
ata2: <ATA channel 0> on atapci0
ata3: <ATA channel 1> on atapci0
[...]
ad4: DMA limited to UDMA33, device found non-ATA66 cable
ad4: 238418MB <WDC WD2500JS-75NCB3 10.02E04> at ata2-master UDMA33

As far as I know, the message doesn't make any sense, since it's a
SATA drive.  I don't know whether it has any actual effect or is
simply a bogus warning.  The drive doesn't seem slow to me so far.

John